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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   26023 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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You need to consider demand for relocation as well as supply in the analysis. The expected gain in 1500 AD from moving from e.g. West Africa to Europe, given the risks and the relative differences in quality of life, were pretty small compared to the expected gain from moving in 2024. It wasn't like Europeans were fighting off hoards of African immigrants. And in 1900, what would the average African villager going to do in places where they don't speak the language, don't have much marketable skills, don't have immunity to local diseases, and don't have a welfare state to use?

In the Imperialist period, the transfer was the other way: hordes of European economic migrants swarming to the Americas and Africa.

In the UK, a lot of the black immigration was driven by things like African nurses coming over for work after 1945, during a period of labour shortages in the UK.

I would say that the key factors were (a) the Great Divergence in economic prosperity between the West and the Rest, due to the rise liberal capitalism in the former; (b) differences in population growth, and (c) better information transfer, so that even poor Africans could know that the poor in the West enjoyed a better standard of living.

Restrictions on immigration, with a few exceptions (like the White Australia policy) were less important than the above factors, I think.

I agree. Any Indian could legally move to England through the entire period of the British occupation of India. There were even Indian MPs, Indian students at elite public schools and British universities and so on. But there was little demand to immigrate. A big reason for mass immigration is ease of travel and mass media. The UK only imposed restrictions on Commonwealth/Empire immigration years after WW2.

A big reason for mass immigration is ease of travel and mass media.

And industrialisation.

Whether you were a peasant in India in 1750 or a peasant in Britain in 1750 didn't matter all that much as far as living standards go. Whether you're a peasant in India in 1980 or even have a minimum wage job in Britain in 1980 however, matters a great deal.

England and the Netherlands were the wealthiest societies in the world starting at their recover from the black death, and retained that title until their colonies dethroned them. Now the difference between $600/yr and $1,000/yr is probably not night and day, but Britain by the period of colonialism had a much higher standard of living compared to India, Africa, etc.

That might be true in some average statistical sense. But would that really help you if you were a typical Indian peasant in 1750? First it would be incredibly expensive to get to England. Then once you got there you'd have to learn English, learn English customs, and learn about how the capitalist economy works. It would be incredibly difficult for them to fit in and get a job, even a low-paying one. There's a high chance they'd just end up worse than they were in India.

I think you'd have to go back to the 1300s at least for British peasants to be as bad off as Indian ones.

If the rough estimates Wikipedia collected are reasonable then you're a surprisingly good guesser.

That econ history minor paying off just as well as my advisor said it would lol

Yes, to the point where "British citizen" (as distinguished from "British subject", which included anyone in the Empire/Dominions) is a fairly recent concept. Americans of a certain age (80+) will sometimes use "British subject" to mean "British citizen", maybe because the latter was not actually a thing when they were young.

The reasons Americans use it is that during the heyday of American civic nationalism that saw a resurgence of interest in the War of Independence around the bicentenary in 1976 one of the big things that was supposed to be different about America was that Americans were 'citizens' (ie. members) of a country rather than 'subjects' of (ie. submissive to) the Crown. I don't think it was really about the empire (at least post-18th century) or British identity per se.

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